Enter the next breed of composer: one who speaks in
programming languages with a strong native accent of a
musical mother tongue, one whose sonic canvas
grows from within the binary belly of a stealth black box and
whose palette includes the sounds of the natural world
and those beyond imagination. Simmered in a cauldron of
aesthetic ferment and painstaking detail, the result is
finally splashed across the landscape of the listener's
mind in a magical swirl of sound. Begin to listen,
and you will hear the birth of a new musical instrument: the
computer.

soundout visited with computer
music composer Paul Lansky to sneak a peek at this instrument of
tomorrow. In his dimly lit office at Princeton University
(where he serves as chairman of the Music Department), we
could find only a hint as to its true whereabouts. Amidst the
stacks of papers, a few clues: a thinly wrapped coil of blue
mylar tape (which we are told was used with an early
refrigerator-sized digital-to-analog converter that
has long since disappeared), and some computer circuitry resting
atop a file cabinet. Flickering in the corner,
however, was the best candidate yet, a NeXt computer,
surfing the Web.

Created by manipulating recorded sounds mixed with
digitally synthesized
sound, Lansky's music is a unique blend
of timbres,
both natural and otherworldly. His music often
incorporates the sound of ordinary instruments (such as the
harmonica in
Guy's Harp), ordinary objects (like the pots and
pans of Table's Clear), and ordinary occurrences
(passing
trucks in Night Traffic, a discussion in
Smalltalk).

"One thing that I've done a lot," said Lansky in an interview
with soundout, "is composing
a fairly complicated texture,
like in my Idle Chatter pieces, in which there's not any
one thing that you're supposed to listen to." Instead of
creating a
texture in which there is a singular focus, such as a primary
melody, Lansky creates
layers of synthesized voices in Idle Chatter, out of
which the listener can choose to focus on one of a variety of
different
elements, including making sense out of the barrage of word
fragments.

Lansky's use of everyday sound as a basis for his music reflects
his desire to give the listener some breathing space while
listening
to his piece. Unlike live music, tape music in a concert
situation
can be particularly alienating. "If instead of a string quartet
playing up on stage you have sound coming out of a loudspeaker,"
Lansky reasons, "you've got a real
problem because you're being confronted directly with the
composer's voice. In other words, you've got a situation in
which you're listening at very close range to what the composer
is saying. Typically, people find tape music in concerts very
exhausting to listen to. My sense of the reason for this is,
very often, [the listener has] very little space to maneuver.
As a listener you're being shouted at, in a sense."

His remedy? Give the listener room to move, to negotiate
with the sounds coming from the speaker by incorporating
familiar elements. In a sense, Lansky treats the loudspeakers
not as the instrument itself, but as a set of windows into
a larger world. "What I've tried to do is to create a sense
that the sounds that are coming
out [of the loudspeaker] have some relation to a physical action,
for example, speech, or people actually playing instruments. The
loudspeakers are kind of windows into an environment in which
somebody is able to perceive things occurring that have a kind of
physical correlate." For example, in Quakerbridge,
Lansky takes the sound of crowds in a busy New Jersey shopping
mall
and sculpts musical lines and harmonies out of the mundane sounds
of
commerce. Throughout the piece, the listener can catch glimpses
of the typical American shopping mall experience (screaming kids,
roving teenagers) filtered though Lansky's unique musical vision.

Lansky's musical career began in a more traditional manner as a
french horn player. After going to Princeton in the late sixties
as a graduate student in music composition, he got interested in
computer music just as the technology was being first developed.
Now, over twenty-five years later, Lansky is a talented computer
programmer as well, having written countless computer programs
to realize his creations. In creating the software
used in making his pieces, Lansky becomes, in effect,
not only composer and performer, but the instrument
designer and manufacturer as well. Lansky is characteristically
modest
about his software, which is available on the internet as
freeware. "I have this program called CMIX
which is out, and a lot of people around here use.
It's essentially put together as a
toolkit. If a professional programmer were to start from
scratch, the whole thing would probably look a little different
and be a lot more efficient and easier to use!."

After an hour of chatting with Lansky, the magical instrument of
tomorrow had yet to surface. Perhaps it was in the basement of
the building, like the mythical Dynamophone of Thaddeus
Cahill,
as it seemed impossible that the little computer sitting on
his desktop could create all those strange
and wondrous sounds. Perhaps, like the composers of old, the
magic
lies within, and beneath his fingers at the keyboard.
This time, however, the keyboard isn't made of ivory, and
its limitations are the boundaries of imagination and sound
itself.

Paul Lansky: It was about the fourth grade, or so, when I
started playing folk guitar and classical guitar. In the seventh
grade I started playing the french horn, and got very serious
about that, and went to The High School of Music and Art as a
french horn player. I got involved in composition in high
school, and from there I went on to college, at Queens College in
New York, where I majored in music. At that point I was sort of
interested in composition, musicology and performing.

After I graduated from Queens, I played horn professionally for a bit.
I played with the Dorian Wind Quintet, which was really great, I
was twenty-two. It seemed to me, however, that I that was about as good as
I was ever going to be as a horn player, but as a composer you
continue to develop your whole life, so I got more and more
interested in composition and came to Princeton as a graduate
student.

Uechi: You mentioned that you began composing in high school. Is
there anything in particular that inspired you to start
composing?

Lansky: I had some friends who were composing, a very close friend
of mine was a fellow named Joshua Rifkin, who is now mainly doing
recordings of Bach, who was composing at that point. I just
loved music so much that I figured that I wanted to do whatever I
could to get involved in music, and composing seemed like the
most interesting thing you could possibly do.

I wasn't one of these people who just sort of "woke up one
morning with a mission from God" that I had to write music, it
just seemed like such an interesting thing to do, and I didn't
see why I shouldn't do it.

I think its really been a long struggle for me. I don't
really think I actually composed any good music until I was in my
mid-thirties. I'm not happy with my early music
, and basically, still, the only music I
really like I composed in the last couple of
years.

Uechi: Did you first get involved with computer music at Princeton
or at Queens College?

Lansky: I got involved with computer music when I came here [to
Princeton] in 1966, and we had just started doing it, and it
seemed like an interesting thing to do.

It was insane, because you had to drive to Bell Labs just to
hear a sound. Imagine, first of all, you programmed everything
on punchcards, then you submitted it and came back the next day,
because the computer only ran one job at a time, and sometimes it
would take hours and hours just to do anything at all. Then you
would come back the next day, and if it worked, you'd check out a
tape and you'd call Bell Labs and make an appointment to go up to
use their digital-to-analog converter. And of course the thing
would sound terrible.

You'd drive up there and you'd park, and then you would have
to phone upstairs and have somebody come and escort you, because
you weren't allow to wander through the halls of Bell Labs. It
took about an hour and a quarter to get there from here, so you
would go with your heart in your mouth, and then you'd go back
with your heart in your stomach.

I worked for about a year and a half on a computer piece
when I was a graduate student, and one day I listened to it and I
said "This is really awful." And I threw it out.

Uechi: Really? Literally nothing of it left?

Lansky: Nothing! I don't think I could reconstruct it if
I tried. I remember what it sounded like, but I don't want
anyone else to remember.

It was actually a very liberating experience at that age to
just abandon a year and a half's worth of work. I felt good
about it after I [abandoned the piece], but then I didn't go back
to computer music until after we didn't have to drive to Bell
Labs anymore, when we got our digital-to-analog converter here.

Uechi: When was that?

Lansky: I think they got it in 1969, and I started working on it
around '73 or so. And this is all that's left of it [he holds up
a loosely coiled pink roll of thin tape, about an inch wide].
This is a mylar tape, and the converter was run by the first
computer that Hewlett Packard made. [The converter] was a big
thing, about the size of a refrigerator, and it had 64K of
memory. It had no operating system, so you would have to load
the operating system in with a boot-strap loader with 64 words of
memory. Then you'd load the program on paper tape, which kept
tearing, so we finally made the tapes on mylar, figuring that
would last. And now it's twenty-five years later and the only
thing left is the mylar tape with the program on it.
The computer disappeared in the early eighties.

Uechi: At what point did you get involved with programming and
developing software?

Lansky: Very early. That was one of the things that attracted me.
When we first started to use computers, using what's called a
assembly macro language, we would write something like "oscil"
and the program would then compile that into a couple of lines of
assembler. This was an assembler called BEFAP on the IBM 7094.
One of the things that got me first interested in programming was
that it was such a pain to punch cards. There were these things
that we used to have called A and B subroutines. These
subroutines were written in FORTRAN, and what you used to be able
to do was to use the subroutines to actually generate notes. I
learned FORTRAN to write these subroutines, and I would generate
note lists. I'm still doing that sort of thing, actually.

Then when we moved to a bigger computer and had a program
here called Music 360, by Barry Vercoe, which was a predecessor
of Music 11, which was a predecessor of CSOUND. It was a very
good program, it ran very fast on the IBM 36091. But then Barry
left, and you would never knew what was wrong [with the program].
I decided the only way in which I was going to become comfortable
doing this sort of thing was if I was my own best expert. My
thinking about these things is what you really want to do is
maximize the number of experts you have nearby. If you become
the leading expert then that's the maximum optimization you can
get.

So one day I said "Well, what will it take to write my own
synthesis program?", and I wrote a very small synthesis program
and it really turned out to be easy. One thing led to another,
and I'm still using software that I write. I really like that,
because I hate being dependant on other people, and having to say
"How does this work?". My philosophy has been that you learn
enough so that you become your own best expert.

Uechi: At any point did you stop what you were doing musically to
study programming specifically?

Lansky: No, it's all on the job training. I learned it all on the
street. I've never taken a programming course, and I'm
actually not a very good programmer. I write lots of programs,
but when you see programs written by a professional programmer
they are clearly another order of thinking about how programming
goes. My programs work, but I don't feel that comfortable about
advertising them as "the way to do things".

I have this program called CMIX which is out, and a lot of
people around here use. It's essentially put together as a
toolkit. If a professional programmer were to start from
scratch, the whole thing would probably look a little different
and be a lot more efficient and easier to use.

Uechi: The toughest question: how would you describe your music to
someone who has never heard it before?

Lansky: Oh, that's a very hard question. I can deal with that sort
of question in general terms. I think I can field that in a
sense as "How do I recommend approaching music that you are
unfamiliar with, in general?"

The kind of thing that I think is important for somebody to
think about is to take the analogy of meeting people. When you
meet a person, your first take on them is to try to abstract the
qualities that the person has and say, "Well, this person reminds
me of this group of people, or this friend of mine." Your way of
indexing your response to that person has a lot to do with all of
the people you know, and it has a lot to do with your attitudes
towards people. Then what happens, and I'm sure everyone's had
this experience, is that as you get to know the person better, all the
things that you used to classify, quantify and categorize the
person to start with, drop by the wayside. The person's
qualities become unique qualities.

Then change the word 'music' for the word 'person'. You have
the same relation the first time you hear music that is
unfamiliar music or that you're not used to hearing, what you try
to do is classify and index it by the kind of music you've known.
Then, as you get to know it better, it becomes its own world.
This is the case with Mozart as well as with new music. You hear
a piece by Mozart and the first thing you do is classify it by
thinking about all the kinds of Classical music that you've
heard, with these kinds of configurations, and with your
experiences with music theory, tonal theory, and syntax. This
all tells you a lot things. But at a certain point, the piece
utterly transcends those things. The interesting thing about
thinking in those terms is if you have a piece which ultimately
fails to transcends those categories perhaps it tells you
something [negative] about the piece.

Everyone's had the experience when they were about eight
years old of wondering how you could ever invent a tune. There
are all these tunes, and they seem to be God given things. You
can't imagine something you know as an object that was invented from
scratch at some point. That sort of leads back to the whole
concept of what music is.

To cut to the bottom line: My recommendation for anybody who
is listening to my music and finds it unfamiliar or bizarre (and
I don't think most people do, I think my music is less unfamiliar
or bizarre than a lot of music that is made with computers) is to
give it several tries, and come back to it. Then if you don't
like it [pause], don't listen to it again [laughter]!

I think that's the best I can do with a question like that.
I go to parties and things like that and people say [mocks
dialogue]:

"Oh, you're a composer! What do you write? Is it sort of
like Pearl Jam?"
"No.." "Sort of like Cole Porter?"
"No. I work with electronic music." "Oh! [with a hint of recognition]" and I remember someone
said, "Like Peter Gabriel, right?"
"Well, not quite..." [chuckle] What they are trying to do
is to index it immediately.

Uechi: Your music incorporates natural sounds into a musical
environment. Where would you point to as the beginning of this
aesthetic? I thought of perhaps Cage, perhaps Pierre Schaffer
and Musique Concrete?

Lansky: No, no...I've thought about this a lot recently.
Essentially, you start out with the fact that what I like to do
is create sound on tape. If you just accept that as an activity
that I'm going to engage, the next thing I notice is that it
really creates a lot of paradoxes that have to do with how people
take it in. There's not a familiar social institutional
structure to be received: it's not music that's designed to be
played in the concert hall, it's probably more congenial to be
played at home. Still, it's a complex problem (over the
years I haven't ever really thought explicitly about this), and
I think basically what I've been doing is responding to the
social situation that the music sets up.

The way I like to think about it these days is this: if you
think about sitting in a concert hall and listening to a string
quartet play, or something like that, you have a comfortable
relation to the composer's voice because the composer's voice is
being activated by people. It's being activated by a live
ensemble and people are interpreting and performing it, and you
as a listener have a fairly large space to roam. You can wonder
about the performance, you can notice how the players are doing,
you can concentrate on the way the music goes, you can do all
kinds of things. You're in a fairly comfortable position to have
a good relation to the music.

Parenthetically, I feel that listening to music is an
intensely interactive process. When you listen to a piece of
music, you're constantly negotiating deals with the piece.
You've got this chatter going on in your brain, and the piece is
telling you something, you're working on what the piece is
telling you and it's coming back and telling you something else
and you're going back and dealing with it, and so on. This is
why I have real questions about the notion of "interactive"
composition. I think music is interactive to start with, reading a book is
interactive, all these things are intensely interactive.

Now, if instead of a string quartet playing up on the stage
you have sound coming out of a loudspeaker, you've got a real
problem because you're being confronted directly with the
composer's voice. In other words, you've got a situation in
which you're listening at very close range to what the composer
is saying. Typically, people find tape music in concerts very
exhausting to listen to. My sense of the reason for this is,
very often, [the listener has] very little space to maneuver.
They've got very little room to tinker with the experience, they're actually
being confronted by the composer's voice directly.

Uechi: So there's no question of interpretation...

Lansky: There's no question of interpretation, but as a listener
you're being shouted at, in a sense.

My take on what I've been trying to do over the years is to
create in the piece itself a space that the listener can use to
maneuver. This is all sort of "Monday-morning quarterbacking",
because I didn't calculate this before I went in to doing these
pieces. I just tried to respond to what I thought was going to
make an interesting piece. I think that what I've been trying to
do is to engage a lot of things in pieces which make it more
comfortable for people to deal with the piece, and to give them
room to walk around.

For example, one thing that I've done a lot of is composing
a fairly complicated texture, like in my 'Idle Chatter' pieces
['Idle Chatter',' just_more_idle_chatter',
; 'Notjustmoreidlechatter', all on Bridge CD 9050 'More Than Idle Chatter'], in
which there's not any one thing in particular that you're
supposed to listen to. You know, there's not a lead tune. So
instead what happens is that you're put in a position where you
can browse up and down the spectrum, and there's not one thing
that you have to listen to. Also, the textures are fairly
complex, so that the kinds of things that you will do will very
often not be easy to parse. They'll be seemingly easy to parse,
but essentially they're kind of difficult. In the 'Idle Chatter'
pieces dancers have had a terrible time because it seems rhythmic
and perfectly obvious, but as soon as they try to figure out how
to count the thing, everything falls apart, and they have had
very little luck in doing it.

Another thing that I've done that sort of gives the listener
room to maneuver is to create textures which have a lot to do
with the sense that the loudspeakers themselves are windows into
a larger space. The traditional notion of recording, for
example, is that what you have is an archive of an event that
actually existed, that the sounds themselves originated by some
physical action. The notion of sound as abstracted from any
physical action is a fairly new one. That's what leads people to
describe early electronic music as outer-space music. What I've
tried to do is to create a sense that the sounds that are coming
out [of the loudspeaker] have some relation to a physical action,
for example, speech. Another thing that I've done a number of
pieces with is to use people actually playing instruments, and
actually playing familiar kinds of music. In a sense, the
loudspeakers themselves are not the actual instruments, but the
loudspeakers are kind of windows into an environment in which
somebody is able to perceive things occurring that have a kind of
physical correlate.

Another thing that I've tried to do in pieces, and this is
something I'm increasingly interested in now, is to create a kind
of ambiguity so that you've got to actually do some work in order
to figure out what's going on. The first piece I actually
succeeded in doing this is called 'Now and Then' [Bridge BCD
9035] which just consists of phrases from children's stories.
When people listen to this piece they hear something that sounds
like it should be a story, but they don't hear the story, they
just hear some connecting phrases. As a listener you've got to
actually go in and pick apart things and make associations. I'm
trying to engage a kind of interactive sense in the listener.
These are all things that I didn't plan. I didn't say "A-
ha! What I'm going to do is such-and-such, in order to do such-
and-such!" But as I look back, I think essentially what I've
been trying to do is to create a space for the listener to move
around, with respect to the piece. This is particularly because
these things are on tape and because they are not performed by
people, in a sense I am the performer.

I think that a lot of really powerful electronic music pieces,
which can really knock you out, are in a sense very oppressive,
and almost abusive in a way.

Uechi: "Knock you out" meaning...

Lansky: Well, you know, just impress you with all kinds of "zingo"
sounds that swirl around the room and shatter your ears, and do
all kinds of things to you. It's sort of a real macho view of
things. Those are fun, but what happens to me is that I just
find myself backing away because I don't have any room to
interact with the piece, I'm being told what to do. There's also
a kind of paradox that has to do with the way in which a lot of
us are trying construct a new model of what musical continuity
and musical discourse is all about.

Uechi: What would you say is 'the venue' for your music? Do you
purposely conceive of it to be played in concert hall, at home,
or does it not matter?

Lansky: I don't think that the venue matters as much as the overall
context. If you take one of my pieces and you try to play it as
the seventh piece on a whole concert of electronic music, I think
it's going to essentially fall flat. On the other hand, we've
done a number of concerts around here where we've mixed computer
pieces and instrumental pieces, and you can do it really nicely
so that you get a flowing sense of one thing rolling into
another.

What I like a lot is putting pieces out on CD, so that
people can use them any way they want. I know dancers have used
them, and I just got a royalty check from Public Television
because they used one of my pieces as the background music to
something called "The Sports Connection" [laughs]. I haven't the
slightest idea what they did with it, but I was perfectly
satisfied. One of my pieces was used as the ambient sound of the
opening of a jazz festival in Zurich a couple of years ago. And
somebody who runs an alternative rock and roll magazine in
Minnesota got very excited about my recent CD, and she likes to
put in her Walkman listen to it on the bus.

I would say that I have no sense of any kind of sanctity
about the way in which it is to be used, but there are certainly
contexts in which it's going to be awkward, and contexts in which
it's going to well used.

Uechi: A few of the things you mentioned earlier still play a
important part in who you are now. In a sense you're still
performing.

Lansky: Yes, absolutely.

Uechi: And also talking about controlling the technical aspects,
and becoming your own best expert, that's still a part of making
tape music. Now what about writing for acoustic instruments? Do
you still interested in doing that?

Lanky: I have, usually kicking and screaming. It's happened
several times that some performers say "Hey, we'd love to
commission you to write a piece for tape and our instruments."
And I say "Oh, alright. That's not my favorite combination...but
I'll listen." So then they apply and they don't get the grant
[to fund the commission], so then I do the piece anyway, but
without the tape [chuckle]. Because I essentially don't enjoy
doing [pieces for instruments and tape], although I'm still open
to the idea, I haven't been that good at it.

I did a piece [entitled 'Hop'] recently for Marimolin, a
marimba and violin duo, which they've recorded very nicely
[Marimolin, Combo Platter. BMG/Catalyst 62667-2] and performed all
over the place. I just heard them do it last week in New York
and they just creamed it, and it was great!

I think in order to write instrumental music, it's like
anything else, you've really got to do a lot of it and get
experience at it. I don't think I've spent that much time over
the years doing it, so it's difficult for me. When it works, it
works okay. [Marimolin] loves this piece, but I was very
fortunate because the marimba player lives here in town. I must
of gone over to her house eight or nine times and showed her
things, and every time I'd go over there then I'd throw
it out.

My whole relation to composition is I basically have to have
feedback, in terms of sound. I'm not a good abstract, pencil-
and-paper composer. I've really got to sit in a room and have
sound coming at me, and then sort of punch it and do things with
it. [mocks internal dialogue] "That sounds better?" "Okay...",
and that's really what I love about doing tape music. My
happiest moments have been just sitting in my room at home,
playing something and saying "Well, how can I make this a little
better?" [Then I] tweak something, and "Yes!" And finally after
a day's work you get something that sounds great.

I've always been very frustrated putting notes down on paper
because it takes so much time to do. I think that if you're
going to write for instruments, you've really got to hear it a
lot and work with players.

Uechi: What are your views on the future of live music?

Lansky: People are always going to play instruments and sing and
shout. That's just part of being human. I don't think anyone
should have any fear that somehow computers are going to replace
humans. There was a period, I guess we're coming back from it
now, when a lot of musicians were being put out of work by
machines. Essentially, I think we discovered that machines were
not that good substitutes for people.

I don't think that somehow we're going to see, a generation
from now, people who just don't play instruments.
Take the guitar, for example. If you walk along Forty-Seventh
Street [in Manhattan], or you go to any [music] store and there
are guitars all over the place. All of a sudden you see three or
four guys in there (usually men at this point, but I think women
are getting involved, too), and they pull down the guitar [off
the rack] and they play incredibly. The level of guitar playing
in the world at this point is just astounding, and the nice thing
about the guitar is that you can get up to speed fairly fast.
There are all kinds of great players out there who are doing
wonderful things.

I think we will see more automation [in live performance],
in a sense. You already do see it with a lot of guitar effect
boxes, and MIDI studio type things. You see lots of kinds of
things where people are using machines in a variety of ways.

I don't think, in the long run, that technology is going to
force the issue by virtue of being technology. People are
ultimately not going to be interested in the fact that something
is done on a computer, and already that's happening. 'Computer
music' as such is becoming a dead issue and in effect what I've
been working towards for a few years is 'the death of computer
music'.

I would really like to see us reach a point where the fact
that something is made on a computer is just totally
uninteresting to anybody out there. You already see it in
popular music. My stuff still sometimes ends up in the computer
music bin [at record stores], although I try to avoid it. But
Peter Gabriel's stuff doesn't end up in the computer music bin,
and his use of computers is much more sophisticated than mine.
He probably spends much more on hardware than I do, and I'm sure
the number of CPU's in his studio is twenty-times the number in
mine.

Uechi: You briefly mentioned MIDI. What's the relationship between
MIDI and your music?

Lansky: I've been very unhappy about MIDI. I've used MIDI on a
couple of occasions for gesture capture. I did one piece which
was kind of a real-time version of my piece 'Smalltalk', which was
sort of a voice activated system. The thing I don't like about
MIDI is the musical situation that it puts you in with respect to
timbre. In the piece that I did, which was called 'Talk Show',
you basically speak into a microphone and it activates all kinds
of stuff. The piece works best when you turn the gain up and let
the thing improvise on it's own output. That sort of worked well
as a nice installation.

What I really disliked about MIDI was the way in which
timbre and physical action are detached. I don't like the way
that you arbitrarily link a patch and a note. Anybody who has
worked a lot with MIDI would say "That's obviously not the way I
think about it." But I think the basic structure of [MIDI], in
as much as it is arbitrary with respect to timbre, leads you to
thinking about things in a rudimentary way, so that what you do
is you compose the music, then you orchestrate it. It's almost a
really primitive view of orchestration, at least that's my take
on it.

So, I haven't been that pleased with MIDI synthesizers and I
haven't got that involved with them. You know, they're fun and
you can do a lot with them.

I think what we are going to ultimately see, and we're very
seeing it somewhat right now, is a merging of software and
MIDI, so a lot of the things that you do on a MIDI keyboard, for
example, will be able to be done in software. There's a company
that's coming out with a child's game next Christmas that does a
gigaflop worth of processing. If you realize that the DX7 is a
25 mps machine, the difference is a huge amount of processing
You could have five hundred DX7s being synthesized in
real time on one of these machines.

Uechi: Along the same lines, what changes in technology over the
last fifteen years have most profoundly affected your work?
Perhaps, where do you see that going in the future?

Lansky: The thing that has most directly affected me was the
availability of cheap workstations. The fact that the prices
just keep going down, so that now you can get for the price of a
cheap used car, what used to be the price of a Mercedes Benz,
what before that was the price of a fairly expensive house, and
before that was a couple of million dollars worth of things.

In the early and mid-eighties I used to really feel
terrible. I would go around to schools and play things for
people that I had done on a two million dollar machine, and show
them what could be done, but there was no way in which they could
do it. One of the things I liked about MIDI was the
democratization of the field, so that anybody could set up a
studio fairly cheaply.

The drop in prices has been the most sensational thing, and
the increase in speed has certainly allowed us to contemplate
kinds of processing that we wouldn't have even considered years
ago. People now routinely do convolution of sounds, which is
fairly time consuming, but in the old days that would have taken
two days and now you can do it in a few minutes. Just in the
past four years we've seen a speed-up of almost two orders of
magnitude in computers. Going from 68030 NeXt Machines to a 90
megahertz Pentium, basically that's about a hundred fold increase.
At the same, the cost has dropped by a factor of
ten, so you've had a two fold increase in the order of magnitude
of computational ability, and a one order of magnitude decrease
in cost.

Now you can get a gigabyte disk for eight hundred dollars.
We spent twenty-eight thousand dollars for about six hundred
megabytes a few years ago, and it wasn't too long ago that people
were spending a million dollars just for one megabyte of memory.
You were probably practicing piano really hard at that point
[chuckles].

That kind of acceleration has not been matched by musical
developments. Music has moved much more slowly, but I think
that's the way that music works. Music does not move at the
speed of technology, music moves at the speed of human
development. I would say that essentially there's probably not
all that much difference between computer music today and
computer music twenty years ago. I think that we're doing things
in a more complicated way, and we're experimenting with things
and not so interested in the 'sci-fi' aspects anymore. The
technological aspects are not knocking us out so much anymore,
and the fact that it's done on a computer is not making that much
difference.

Essentially the use of computers to make music is still in
its infancy. It's really not a mature field at all, and I don't
think there is any reason why you would expect it to be. People
didn't learn to write for the piano in thirty years. If you just
look at the difference between Scarlatti and Chopin (what's that,
a period of about eighty, ninety years?), that's a really
interesting development. Even Scarlatti to Beethoven, which is a
period of fifty years. Things moved more slowly back then, but
still I don't think that music is ever going to move at speeds
which are comparable to what you see in science. It's just not
the nature of the thing. The way we listen develops very slowly.

Actually, a really good measure of this is to look at what's
happened in recording technology. Recording technology is now a
hundred years old. It's gotten significantly better,
particularly in the last couple of years, although there's still
a lot of things that have to be worked out. Still, what people
use recording for is fairly similar to what they were using
recording for forty or fifty years ago. Basically the market is
being driven by a lot of recordings of things that have the
appearance of records of live performances. It's less true in
popular music, but it's still the case that these things move
slowly.

I would say that maybe fifty years from now we'll be able to
assess how things have developed, but I don't think things have
moved all that much, although people disagree with me.

Uechi: An easy ones to finish up: What's on the table? What are you
working on now?

Lansky: Umm...I'd prefer not to describe what I'm working on
[chuckles]. The last thing I did was a very interesting project.
I did a piece for Tim Brady, who is a Canadian guitarist, for
electric guitar and tape. The tape part is essentially a
seventeen minute, wacky drum track, and the guitar part is
entirely improvised.

Uechi: Nothing is written down?

Lansky: That's right, nothing. I didn't even tell him anything!
When I first started to do it, I realized, as I started to try to
figure out how I was going to write for guitar, nothing I could
ever do would come near what an electric guitarist could make up
on the spot. So, it's kind of a collaborative composition. It's
really interesting to me, because it opens up an
interesting space for the way in which people interact. I'm sort
of building a studio in which he plays, or another way to look at
it is I'm doing the soundtrack for his movie, or he's doing the
soundtrack for my movie. The two components really interact. A
lot of people have been interested in doing this piece. It's
gotten an interesting reaction.

Uechi: What's the name of this piece?

Lansky: The piece is called "Dance Tracks". Right now, I'm working
on a couple of things but I'd prefer not...If I describe them,
then I'll have to know how I want to think about them. So...